Minibow - weird situation

[nanoman4]

I started my 7 gallon minibow Wednesday october 6th by adding very good quality live rock and an AC500 fuge with great LR rubble. Pods were scurrying around my tank and I thought I was off to a good start.

My test kit was showing wacky cycle readings but finally they subsided the next wednesday, so my cycle completed in a week. I was so impulsive I went off and bought a cleanup crew this past Saturday, which consisted of 3 nassarius snails, 2 astrea snails, 2 blue legged hermits, 2 scarlet hermits, a porcelain crab and a cleaner shrimp. I drip acclimated all of them in the same bucket (the fact that they were all from different tanks at the LFS might of been the problem) for an hour. I released them into the tank, and all was well. The next day the cleaner shrimp died and I couldnt find the porcelain crab (hes tiny so he could be dead or anywhere deep in the rock. Later at night I discovered 2 astrea snails taht were obviously dead and almost out of there shell, and wouldn't react if I touched them. Today, my hermits have all survived, and im noticing some wacky behavior with one of my nass snails....its like retarted, flipping upside down and staying opened, then sometimes moving around....wonder if its suffering. The othe 2 nass snails havent moved at all besides there little tubes. I test for ammonia every day now and constantly get 0. my nitrites also at 0 and nitrates 10-20ppm. SG 1.024 and temp 76 day/78 night. I also noticed my water a bit cloudier today and tons of tiny hairs floating around.

 

Anyone know the reason for these deaths or what could be going on? Please help before I lose the rest of my inverts.

[Rmcm2424]

It's hard to say when your water parameters seem fine. Are you using RO water? If not you might want to check for copper (it's a long shot, you shouldn't have much, if any, copper in your system unless you added it) but I had a customer the other day who kept having inverts die and come to find out his house was plumbed with copper and was using his tap water and it had a very high copper reading which killed the inverts real quick. The fact that you acclimated them all together but they weren't from the same system may have shocked many of them, not really sure. See if anyone else has any ideas.

[xplicit]

Do a water change to bring the nitrate down. Inverts are sensitive to high nitrate.

[nanoman4]

I use poland spring distilled water, and cataline real ocean water for water changes. is 10-20ppm considered high nitrate?

BTW I just changed a gallon of water, about 15%. Gonna check on them in the morning see if there moving a little better.

 

Sometimes do inverts just go into shock for a week or so when they go into a new system? Like not move at all?

[ProFlatlander15]

i just got 6 astraeas and 2 scarlet hermits...and they dont do much of anything..my h20 parameters are fine...but they just arent moving alot, i aclimated them for bout 45 minutes...maybe they need to be acclimated more?

[CSMReef]

All of my cleanup crew went straight to cleaning no burrowing or anything. My guess would be that the company that distills the water possibly is using copper pipes and/or the 20 ppm nitrates. Then again I added my cleanup crew with 20 ppm nitrates and I have had no problems. They have been in there for about 3-4 weeks.